


Nightcall

by darthrevaan (Burning_Nightingale)



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Mild Gore, Minor Violence, Paranoia, Reunions, post-season 13
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-19
Updated: 2017-02-19
Packaged: 2018-09-25 12:22:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9820382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Burning_Nightingale/pseuds/darthrevaan
Summary: Megan Wu has moved on with her life.She doesn't need visits from old friends.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is an updated and expanded version of something I wrote for the Iron Gulch challenge a month or two ago. I listened to the Nightcall cover by London Grammar a lot while writing this, which is where the title comes from. 
> 
> Enjoy!

The target’s name is Kevin Kang.

There’s a file about him sitting on the coffee table, with everything Ben has been able to scrape together stuffed into it. He dropped it in her hands during their morning coffee break, with a sly smile and a warning to ‘be careful with this one’.

Megan hasn’t looked at it yet. She took it out of her bag when she got home and laid it on the table, ready, intending to read it after dinner, but got side-tracked.

The feeling of being watched is back, stronger than before.

It started two weeks ago; like an itch between her shoulder blades, the feeling of someone staring at her, the suspicion that when she turned to look someone would be there behind her. Waiting. She could explain it away as a bounty hunter’s natural predisposition toward paranoia, but somehow this feels different.

More sinister.

Tonight, she has all the lights in the apartment off, letting the ambient glow of the city filter in through the windows and paint the apartment in shades of blue and purple. Megan sits on one of the stools at the kitchen counter, her back against the wall, intentionally placed out of the sniper sight lines she’s always aware of, her fingers curled around a mug of cold coffee.

They’re small windows; they leave a lot of room for shadows and dark corners.

There’s not much chance of her seeing anything, or gleaning any great insight from this. If someone’s watching her, and if they’re competent, they know she hasn’t left the building. Considering the type of people she brings in, they’re probably competent.

After two hours of sitting alone in the dark she calls Ben. “You swept my house for bugs again this week, didn’t you?” she asks him.

“Yes, Meg, I went over the whole place. Got nothing,” Ben says, his tone long-suffering. “You having another round of paranoia?”

“How could you tell,” she says dryly.

“I work with _bounty hunters_.” He laughs. “I see people go through this a lot, Meg. Ignore it, get some sleep, and in a few weeks it’ll all have blown over and you’ll be wondering what the hell you were so hyped up about.”

She sighs. “I guess so. Goodnight, Ben.”

Megan takes his advice, but it’s a long time before she sleeps.

/

The file on Kang leads her to a hacker named Declan Masters, and from the moment she meets him, Megan can tell he wants something.

It’s not until after she’s set up a meeting and they’ve gone through terms and agreed payment that she realizes what he wants is a shot at being her partner.

The idea amuses her. She thought she’d made it clear to all and sundry that wasn’t interested in working with anyone; that she was never _going_ to be interested in working with anyone. People who knew her story stayed off her case; people who didn’t soon learned.

“You trying to matchmake, Alhanzo?” Megan asks when she visits the _Seven Star Lounge_ , the jazz bar he likes to call home.

Alhanzo is an information broker like Ben, only a little more successful. He basks in that wealth, though he likes to pretend otherwise. Slightly portly, with watery eyes and greasy hair, Alhanzo projects the impression of a salesman down on his luck, but Megan knows better. She’s seen his car, for one thing – and she’s also seen him throw a punch.

“I do worry about you sometimes, Wu,” he says, though the words ring false to her ear. “Working alone after so many years on a team.”

He’s also one of the few brave enough to make reference to what happened to her. To them.

“You know better than anyone why I work alone,” she snaps.

Alhanzo takes a measured sip of his drink. “There’s always time for hearts to change.”

“Yeah,” Megan says, trying to keep the bitterness out of her voice. “That I’ve learnt better than anyone.”

That night she dreams about Mason.

/

Declan contacts her a week later, promising he has everything she asked for. He suggests they meet in a bar on her side of town; it’s a place she knows well, and she wonders if he knows that.

She gets there before him – intentionally – and orders a drink, leaning against the bar to sip it and take in the clientele. There’s no one she recognises, no one who looks out of place. Every sense in her body has been on high alert for two weeks, but if there really is someone following her, they’ve been good enough to avoid tipping her off in any concrete way at all. That, or whoever they are, they just know her very, very well.

Megan isn’t sure which is the more terrifying option.

Declan arrives ten minutes after her, a tall, confident figure just on the edge of lanky, the lines of his long coat making him look taller than he really is. He doesn’t drop it off with the cloakroom attendant; instead he walks across to her and mutters under his breath, “We should probably take this outside.”

Megan feels a flutter of nerves along with her surprise. Is this the prelude to something? To her possible stalker finally making a move?

Then a voice in her mind says _Through Declan?_ and she relaxes. No one professional would work with this guy, no matter how much Alhanzo recommends him.

“Did you have a place in mind?” she asks, arching an eyebrow at him.

He motions that she should follow him, then ducks behind the bar and into the kitchen. No one bats an eyelash as he leads her through the hot, steamy room and out through the back door.

The door opens up onto the alley at the back of the club, where the cooks like to smoke and bitch about their shitty boss behind his back. Several of them are gathered in a small circle when Declan opens the door, muttering to each other over the dully glowing ends of their cigarettes. They take one look at Megan and jointly decide to shuffle off down towards the street.

It’s dank and dirty, lit unevenly by flashes of neon light from the signs out on the street. Several dumpsters are pushed against the walls, piled high with stinking rubbish bags, all rusty with age and probably leaking onto the rough, wet tarmac.

“So. The packet?” she asks, when they’re alone.

Declan pulls a memory drive out of his coat pocket and hands it to her. “Everything you asked for. All the information I could find is on that sucker.”

Megan nods and pulls out her tablet. When she opens the files Declan uploaded to the memory drive, she sees exactly what she wanted; surveillance photos, a list of movements, transcripts of tapped phone conversations, and more. She nods and puts both tablet and memory drive in her bag.

Declan has given her everything she needs to know. “You’ve been helpful, Dec,” she tells him, subtly shifting back on her heels. If he realizes she’s done with him, he might make a move. “I’ll be sure to let Alhanzo know you got me what I needed.”

“So, this it?” he says, frowning. “I don’t pass the grade?”

Megan narrows her eyes at him. “I laid out the deal with you before, Dec,” she tells him. “I never said you were in on this. I asked for information, nothing more.”

He scowls at her. “Listen, I know what I’m worth, and I know _you_ don’t have a partner. This is a perfect opportunity for us to-”

“Not that I don’t appreciate the offer,” Megan cuts him off, “but I don’t do partners anymore. Ever. I thought Alhanzo would’ve made that clear.”

“ _Everyone_ works with a partner. All the big guns,” Declan says. She can hear anger creeping into his voice now. “And people want me, but I’m _choosing_ you.”

“If people want you, go work with them,” Megan says dismissively.

“You think I gave you that info for nothing?” Declan demands. “This was a deal; taking me on was implicit in it.”

“Guess I didn’t read the fine print,” Megan says with a raised eyebrow.

Declan narrows his eyes. “You go back on it, you’re breaking the deal. Insulting Alhanzo.”

“You really think you can threaten me into being your partner?” Megan says. She keeps her voice level, cool. Dangerous.

“You’re not who you used to be,” Declan says, his voice suddenly very quiet. “I know about what happened. You _used_ to be untouchable. Well, _newsflash_ , Wu, you’re not surrounded by your buddies anymore. You’re alone now. Vulnerable. That’s why you need me.”

Surprised despite herself, Megan laughs. “Declan,” she says, reaching for the handgun that hangs in the holster on her lower back, “There’s a big difference between _alone_ and _vulnerable_.”

She doesn’t have time to draw and pull the trigger. The moment Declan’s hand goes for his own gun – tucked into the waistband of his jeans, Megan has no doubt – his head explodes in a grisly fountain of red, blood that looks dark and slick as oil under the flickering neon. He drops without another word.

Megan also drops, crouching and rolling away under cover as fast as she can, her heart jangling in her chest. _Sniper, sniper_ , is all she can think. She crouches in the shadow of a dumpster, hand tight around her gun, and waits for movement.

She isn’t kept waiting long. A figure drops down from the fire escape above, landing smoothly on the rough tarmac, and goes over to the body. After looking at it for a moment he raises his head. “Megan,” he says, voice soft but loud enough to carry. “Are you alright?”

Megan freezes. For a second it’s like her heart stops beating. Shock courses through her – because _no_ , it can’t be him. Not now. Not here.

But she would recognise that voice anywhere.

Slowly she stands, not dropping the gun. Megan keeps it pointed squarely at his heart as she steps forward and says, “I don’t need you to drop my targets for me anymore, Sam.”

The figure – and it _is_ him, god, he’s exactly the right build and height and everything she remembers – shrugs very slightly.

“What are you doing here?” she demands.

“Looking for you.”

“Obviously.” She holds the gun steady. “Why?”

“I needed to-” He stops. Struggling to explain. She hates that she knows, but he’s always been that way, and she can’t erase the memories as easily as she wants to.

“Where’s Isaac?” she asks.

“Dead,” Sam says, his voice suddenly wooden.

A bright spark of pain flares up in her chest for a second, then dies down to embers; a moment of mourning for the memory of the man she’d once loved as a brother, a long time ago. “I can’t say I’m especially sorry to hear that,” she says, keeping her voice cold.

“I didn’t expect you to be.” Sam is silent for a long moment, looking at her intently, studying her in that way he has. “I needed to see that you’d survived,” he says eventually.

“Funny, you didn’t seem to care when you left.”

“I didn’t.”

“And now you do?”

He’s quiet again. After about a minute he says simply, “I don’t know.”

He’s been through something; some emotional upheaval, a reversal, something earth-shattering and life-changing. Megan still knows him well enough to be able to tell. “Well,” she says, slowly dropping the gun and putting it back into its holster, “Thank you for caring, I suppose. Not that it makes me feel differently about…any of it.”

“No.” He says it like it was expected, a given fact. Sam, she thinks, has always understood more than he lets on, and yet so often been blind where it matters most.

She turns toward the mouth of the alley. “I don’t care what you need,” she says, wiping her hands down on the front of her jeans. “I don’t want to see you again.”

“Then you won’t.”

“Good.” She looks back at him, once, over her shoulder. “Goodbye.”

And with that Megan Wu walks out of the alley, out of the past, and into the buzz of the city streets.

_I have regrets_ , she thinks, touching one finger to the tattoo on the inside of her wrist, _But they will not eat me alive_.

**Author's Note:**

> (Still kind of sad the official spelling is apparently 'Megan Wu' and not 'Meghan Wu' but that's probably just me)
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
